Miniature layouts of landscape surfaces are commonly used for scale model toy railroads and adventure games using miniature figures. Such landscape surfaces often contain accessories, such as roads, streams, earthworks, walls, and the like. These accessories are of a type that can be modeled on top of the landscape surface after the topography of hills and valleys is completed. The accessories are typically oblong shapes.
The accessories are sometimes permanently attached to the landscape surface. Prior art accessories, such as roads, river banks, earthworks, and walls are typically made of epoxy putty, sheetrock spackle, or some other material that can be applied when soft and allowed to harden in place. Streams and rivers are cast in place with high gloss polyester resin or some other material and painted or varnished to look like water.
These accessories conform to the configuration of the landscape surface but once fixed in place are unchangeable so there is no variability in either their overall configuration as a group or in their individual placement. This is a prohibitive disadvantage for those who want to change the accessories from time to time, such as between adventure games. Another disadvantage is that such permanent accessories are time consuming to create.
The common alternative to using permanently attached terrain accessories is to use removable terrain accessories. Roads, streams, stream banks, walls, and earthworks are commercially available. These prior art removable accessories are made from rigid materials such as hard cast resin, hard foam, ceramics, ABS plastics, cardboard, etc. Rigid accessories, such as roads and fences, for example, will not go over hills, but they can be used in various combinations or be independently placed on flat landscape surfaces. They can also be used to make turns or curves to the extent that the rigid accessories are curved or bent. Thus, these prior art rigid accessories are limited in their variability of overall group configurations and in their individual placement. Moreover, these rigid accessories, particularly if used in combinations, have an unnatural geometric look when assembled for use.
Homemade terrain accessories such as roads and rivers have been made from colored cloth strips, masking tape, cardboard, acetate, and even chalk marks on a tabletop. Walls and earthworks have been made from balsa wood or other rigid materials. Rigid homemade accessories are even less realistic in appearance than the correspondingly rigid commercially available accessories and have the same disadvantage of being limited in variability. Non-rigid homemade accessories are more variable in configuration and will go over hills and around corners, but masking tape and the like have a very limited visual appeal because they are not realistically contoured models.
In recent years, inventors and modelers have tried to combine the superior appearance of permanently attached terrain accessories with the variability of removable features by the use of modular landscape systems. U.S. Pat. No. 3,352,054 to Glass et al. discloses a modular system using interchangeable tiles. Such systems use large modules and have limited variability. Features such as roads and rivers that are attached to the tiles cannot be changed, only the placement of the tiles in relation to each other may be changed.
Other modular systems use smaller modules, often in hexagon shapes that can be put together in many different combinations. This allows greater variability, but in order to get a certain accessory on the terrain, a separate module with that accessory on it is required. All of the modular systems are time consuming to assemble and there are many joints between the modules which detract from the visual appeal of the assembled terrain and accessories.